Just ahead of her now stood a Cessna Citation X, its navigation lights giving the medium-sized jet the appearance of a constellation on the dark airport tarmac. The aircraft could cruise at Mach 0.92, reach an altitude of 50,000 feet, and cover 3,500 miles. Equally nice, Alice thought, was the chardonnay in the onboard bar.
She ascended the fold-out stairs and entered the twenty-five-foot cabin, which consisted of six leather seats-each dwarfing most recliners-a kitchen, a bar, and a bathroom complete with a shower. Setting her briefcase on the floor by the foremost of the six seats, she caught sight of Alberto outside, hurrying from the runway where Cranch’s plane had just lifted off. Ordinarily Fielding’s man stood every inch of his six four. The way he hunched now, eyes locked on the tarmac, suggested he’d seen her and was pretending he hadn’t. This wasn’t so much bad luck, she thought, as proof of Murphy’s Law.
She jumped down the stairs and ran after him. “Alberto, wait!”
Accelerating, he shoved a hand into a pocket. Probably not for a gun:
He’d be afraid to use one in sight of the many airport workers, passengers, and crew members. When she caught up to him, he had drawn something far worse: a cell phone, presumably to speed-dial Fielding and blow the game.
“Don’t do it!” she said to his back. “I can give you fifty thousand dollars in cash. I have it on my plane.”
He turned around. He shared Hector’s dark, chiseled features. But while Hector’s assembly had gone awry, Alberto had been put together to perfection and, more pertinently, hardened through hours in the dojo with Fielding. She wouldn’t dare engage him without a weapon.
“Fifty K no do me no good,” he said. “Seor Fielding would keelhaul me-you know that.”
“Fly with me, so I can be certain you won’t contact him. When we land, once I get out, the pilot can take you wherever you want.”
“I want the cash you got, plus another two hundred K wired into my account before we leave here.”
“That I can take care of with the iPhone I have onboard in, like, a minute.”
“Fine.”
With a satisfied smile, she returned to the jet. He followed at three paces. Two problems remained. First, her briefcase contained just $5,000. Second, even with all the money in the world, she couldn’t trust Alberto.
The cabin door of the empty aircraft opened onto the small kitchen and the bar, which was copper plated, like those in most luxurious ship’s galleys. Passing the bar, she opened the briefcase on the first seat. No fool, Alberto stayed in the doorway, from which he easily could retreat at any sign of chicanery. He drew his gun and propped it on the bar.
She thought about making a grab for the SIG in her briefcase. The better choice, she decided, was the powerful stun gun concealed by an iPhone casing. She plucked it from her briefcase and powered it on.
“Hector’s got one of those,” he said.
“An iPhone?” She turned to face him.
He had dropped behind the console, out of sight save his sturdy brown hands and the big barrel aimed at her. “No, a Taser disguised as one. Drop it.”
With a groan, she let her fake iPhone fall to the floor. Staring into his barrel, she raised her hands tremulously into the air. She also pressed the big key on the face of the iPhone with the toe of her shoe. The copper-plated bar conducted a current of approximately one million volts. Alberto crumpled to the carpet, his gun falling away from him. Muscles quivering, he lay across the doorway, preventing the pilot and copilot from boarding.
“I have some baggage,” she told them.
6
In an out-of-the-way corner of Little Odessa, Charlie found a peeling four-story building whose hand-painted sign read and in smaller letters beneath that, as if in afterthought, the translation: HOTEL. According to the same sign, the establishment rated five stars.
He slid three tens and a five through a chute in the bulletproof glass encasing the front desk. In return he received a room for the night. The hotel also let by the hour. If all went according to plan, his stay would be less than that.
A drinking song warbled from one of the rooms as he made his way up the stairs. As a result he nearly missed the chirp of his new cell phone.
He answered, “What?”
“That you, professor?” came Grudzev’s voice.
“You can talk to me at my office, mister,” Charlie said, snapping shut the phone.
The exchange meant Grudzev and his men and guns were a go-a triumph. Charlie recognized it was only a small part of the battle, though.
He hurried up to his small, third-floor room, which, while surprisingly tidy, smelled like a butcher’s shop. What mattered was the casement window, or, for his purposes, the escape route. The roof of the adjacent massage parlor was a short jump. He unlocked the handle and let the window glide inward a half inch. To get out in a hurry, he would need only tap it the rest of the way and jump through.
Taking a seat on the magazine-thin mattress, he dialed the number of the Washington Post on his cell phone. He reached a night operator and conveyed enough urgency to be transferred to a junior reporter, the lone person on duty in the newsroom at this hour-3:43, according to the phone. The clock radio bolted to the nightstand was flashing 12:00.
“This might be hard for you to believe-it’s hard for me to believe,” Charlie told her. “I’ve been targeted by a black ops group working under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency. The thing is, if I can disclose what they’ve been up to, their secret will no longer be a secret, which means they’ll no longer have incentive to ‘neutralize’ me. So I was hoping you’ve got a free megabyte or two on your tape recorder.”
“Better you start with the broad strokes,” she said. “You have to understand, we get a lot of these calls.”
Charlie took “these” to mean “crackpot.”
“Have you ever heard of the CIA covert ops unit known as the Cavalry?” he asked.
“No. What’s the story?”
“They began in the early nineties as a collaboration between the agency’s counterproliferation division and counterintelligence, then they went deep black, and, it turns out, too deep.”
“How so?”
“First, let me give you a small amount of background?”
“How small?”
“One column inch?”
“Okay.” The woman emitted a low-energy laugh.
“In the late sixties, our Special Forces scattered boxes of ammunition along the Ho Chi Minh trail for the Vietcong-”
A key snapped open the door bolt, startling Charlie. The ancient floorboards in the hallway were so whiney he’d anticipated he would be able to hear a caterpillar’s approach. The door popped open, and in sailed the man who introduced himself the other night as Smith, attorney with an expertise in negligence suits against boiler manufacturers. His real name was Dewart, Charlie had learned since. It took a beat to recognize him with the swollen face, which was Drummond’s handiwork. As was the right wrist-stabilized now in a splint that permitted him full use of the hand. In the hand was a sound-suppressed SIG Sauer.
“Why would our Special Forces leave ammunition for the Vietcong?” came the reporter’s voice. She sounded intrigued.
Dewart pantomimed for Charlie to hang up.
Charlie glanced out the window. A man now stood just below, on the massage parlor roof, apparently inspecting the elevated water tank.
Charlie sighed in dismay. “Listen, I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he told the reporter. Over her protest, he ended the call.
“What do you say we go grab a cold one, sport?” Dewart said.
